The people behind the map: How TomTom teams keep cities moving during the Football World Championship

A few hours before kick-off, the city starts to shift. Roads that were open that morning begin to close. Shuttle routes replace regular traffic. Fans pour out of train stations, rideshare drivers circle temporary pick-up zones, and downtown streets begin to look less like everyday corridors and more like part of the stadium experience. Somewhere behind the scenes, a TomTom team is watching the map change with it.

During the Football World Championship, this scene repeats across 16 host venues in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Over 39 days and 104 matches, millions of people move through cities that suddenly stop behaving like they usually do. Roads are restricted. Fan zones open. Public transport patterns shift. Weather, incidents, and last-minute decisions can ripple through an entire metro area.

So, how does a map keep up when an entire city starts behaving differently? Long before the first whistle blows, teams across TomTom are already preparing for that exact moment. The work begins before the world is watching.

For Luca Comi from the Map Experts team, preparation starts with the foundations: airports, stadiums, transportation hubs, major points of interest, and the road network connecting them. “With roughly 10% of roads changing every year, even familiar infrastructure requires fresh verification,” Luca explains.

That means checking one-way systems, new ramps, updated intersections, public transportation projects, and changes that may open just before the tournament begins. It also means building relationships with host cities so teams can get reliable updates directly from the source, not after the fact.

For Christian Cruz from the Traffic Quality team, the countdown began when the full match schedule was released. From that point on, each day became “a mix of planning ahead and responding in real time.” The work reaches far beyond stadium gates. Each host city has official fan events, some running for the full tournament, while pop-up gatherings and watch parties can create new movement patterns in places far from the pitch.

Once match day arrives, the map becomes a living system. Fan zones stretch across neighbourhoods. Security perimeters reshape entire districts. Shuttle routes replace normal traffic flows. Downtown streets turn into pedestrian-only areas. And as Christian notes, “even a small disruption can ripple outward when you’re dealing with crowds at this scale.”

Not every city communicates in the same way. Some cities share detailed, fast updates. Others require teams to rely on local news, social media, public webcams, or sudden traffic pattern changes to understand what is happening on the ground. During the tournament, those usual communication habits play out on a much bigger stage.

That is where the partnership between teams matters. Map Experts make sure the map starts accurate. Traffic Quality helps it stay accurate as conditions change minute by minute. Together, they create a continuous loop of preparation, monitoring, validation, and correction so drivers, visitors, and mobility services can keep moving with confidence.

In an age of artificial intelligence, it can be easy to assume maps update on their own. They do not.

AI helps teams move faster by surfacing signals at scale, from sudden speed drops to unusual congestion or possible closures mentioned in local news. But it does not understand context on its own. A slowdown could be normal rush hour, a last-minute fan zone setup, or construction equipment blocking a lane. A reported closure could be real, outdated, or simply incorrect.

Christian sees the same thing in live operations. With so much information coming in from different sources, human expertise is what helps teams decide what is trustworthy, what matters, and what needs to be reflected in the map. It is the layer of critical thinking, validation, and local understanding that turns information into guidance people can rely on.

For millions of fans navigating unfamiliar cities during the Football World Championship, the map is something they rarely think about. That is exactly the point.

Christian describes a similar kind of pride: knowing that residents can still get to work, visitors can reach a fan event or airport on time, and someone leaving a match might simply think, “That was actually easy.” Behind that ease is a huge amount of invisible work: planned closures, temporary transport hubs, pedestrian zones, airport traffic, downtown corridors, and constantly changing flows of people.

That is the quiet impact of location intelligence at TomTom. While millions focus on the Football World Championship, teams behind the scenes are helping routes stay reliable, maps stay accurate, and cities keep moving.

People, data, AI, and local insight all play a role. AI helps teams move faster. But it is human expertise that helps ensure they move in the right direction.